Meeting refreshes singer Jill Cohn

Singer-songwriter Jill Cohn has always been on her own, even when fronting a band.

But after an unexpected encounter on the road with another musician, she’s feeling like a new woman.

“You’ve got two heads, but you’re still sharing the same body. That’s exactly how the duet thing feels,” Cohn said.

She met guitarist Dave Sampson when he contacted her about sitting in on a Bay Area gig.

“He was kind of insistent upon it,” Cohn said. “It was kind of unusual, but I said, ‘Let’s give it a try.’

“The first note he played with me was so perfectly in tune with what I wanted that we ended up playing the whole night together,” she said. “It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. He had done his homework ... and really came to the gig prepared.”

Their collaboration ended up inspiring Cohn’s new CD, “Beautiful I Love You,” and to a tour that brings her to Leftwood’s on Thursday in a free concert.

“Some of the songs came out of the ether for this record, poked their heads up and said, ‘put me on the record,’ but some other pieces were from a few years ago that popped up, and that’s unusual,” Cohn said. “It’s cool to see some of these ideas come full circle.”

Among them is “Highway 40,” inspired by a trip down Interstate 40 that brought her to Amarillo a few years ago.

“I started writing the song and it was a kind of a downer, a ‘woe-is-me’ song, and I didn’t want another one of those, so I shelved it,” she said. “Now, I’m looking back on that time of my life and, being in a more buoyant state, it was easier to finish that song.”

“It wasn’t who I was, it was something I was going through — part of me, but not all of me,” she said. “It took a while to have that perspective.”

And Sampson played a key role in making the song really sing.

“I remember when I finished the song and showed it to Dave, he immediately played the guitar part (that ended up on the CD),” Cohn said. “It was the first thing out of his mouth — or out of his hands, I should say.”